Profile: John Judis

John Judis was a participant or observer in the following events:

The New Republic prints a long analysis of the Bush administration’s misleading use of intelligence to create a false impression that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the US. The article anonymously quotes former ambassador Joseph Wilson commenting on the claim that Iraq had tried to purchase weapons-grade uranium from Niger, saying that White House officials “knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie.” The reporters, Spencer Ackerman and John Judis, identify Wilson as “a prominent diplomat, who had served as ambassador to three African countries,” sent to Niger to investigate the uranium claims (see February 21, 2002-March 4, 2002). “They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie,” Wilson tells the reporters. “They were unpersuasive about aluminum tubes (see Between April 2001 and September 2002 and January 9, 2003) and added this to make their case more persuasive.” (Note: The date of the New Republic article is June 29, but the issue containing it is published over a week earlier.) [New Republic, 6/30/2003]

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani. [Source: FBI]Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a high-level al-Qaeda operative from Tanzania suspected of participating in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in East Africa, is captured in Gujrat, Pakistan, after a violent standoff with Pakistani police. [CNN, 8/3/2004] Ghailani’s arrest is publicly announced on July 29, four days later. The announcement by Pakistan’s Interior Minister Faisal Hayat is made in an unusual late-night press conference that takes place just hours before John Kerry accepts the Democratic nomination for president. [Salon, 8/17/2004] Pakistani authorities say the announcement of Ghailani’s arrest was delayed four days because of the need to confirm his identity before making the proclamation. [BBC, 7/30/2004] But former Pakistani official Husain Haqqani later claims the announcement was timed to upstage the Kerry speech. [Salon, 8/17/2004; United States Conference on International Religious Freedom, 6/30/2005] An article in the New Republic published earlier in the month reported that the Bush administration was asking Pakistan to make high-profile arrests of al-Qaeda suspects during the Democratic National Convention in order to redirect US media attention from the nomination of John Kerry (see July 8, 2004). [New Republic, 7/29/2004] John Judis, who co-wrote the article predicting such an arrest, says the day after the arrest is announced, “Well, the latest development pretty much confirms what we wrote in the article, which is that there was pressure for Pakistan to produce a high-value target during the last 10 days of July and to announce that arrest.” He also asks why is it “they announced [the arrest] at all? Because when you have somebody who’s been in hiding since 1998, they have an enormous amount of information and contacts. By announcing this guy’s arrest, what you do is you warn off everybody who’s been associated with him from the last five or six years. You tell them that they better get their act together or they are going to be found. So, there’s some, really a lot of questions of why they announced this thing when they did.… It may be in this case that we—that we, and the Pakistanis got somebody and prematurely announced this person’s arrest in order to have an electoral impact.” [Democracy Now!, 7/30/2004]

New Republic senior editor John Judis writes of his disappointment that the financial services firm Standard & Poor’s did not explicitly cite the actions of House Republicans as the reason why it issued its downgrade to the US credit rating (see August 5, 2011). One of the reasons why S&P issued its credit downgrade, it said, was because of the “political brinksmanship” waged by members of Congress, resulting in policymaking that has become “less stable, less effective, and less predictable.” Judis notes that while it is virtually indisputable that the firm was referring to the actions of House Republicans who worked furiously to block debt-ceiling legislation (see July 13, 2011 and August 11, 2011), “the statement was sufficiently vague that Republicans could take it as laying the blame on the Obama administration for not agreeing to their proposals for raising the debt ceiling. And, indeed, Mitt Romney and other Republican presidential candidates have blamed President Barack Obama for S&P’s decision” (see August 6-9, 2011). “[T]hose appearing to discount the danger of a default were right-wing Republicans like Representative Michelle Bachmann and Senator Pat Toomey, who are identified with the Tea Party,” Judis writes. Senior S&P director Joydeep Mukherji “acknowledged that a major factor driving the downgrade was the utter irresponsibility and ignorance of a significant minority of Republican legislators,” but refused to cite those Republican lawmakers as responsible for the downgrade. Judis writes: “Why didn’t S&P say this more clearly in the original statement? I suspect it was out of a desire to appear non-partisan, but the effect was to apportion the blame equally on both parties. That is a disservice to the country because it allows a deranged faction of the Republican Party to continue to run riot in the Congress and to undermine any possible of a constructive response to the economic crisis.” Judis concludes, “I stand second to no one in criticizing the White House for failing to fight the Republicans, but it is worth recalling here that the principal cause of our counterproductive fiscal policy is the Republican opposition.” [New Republic, 8/12/2011]

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